Take the Customer Journey Alongside Them

The very foundation of customer experience management is all about trying to figure out what it is customers actually care about, why they commit to the actions they do, what triggers their behaviors and, of course, how to turn all of that information into more “strategic opportunities” (i.e. more money).

And since the customer experience is at the heart of what SDL does, the company recently released its new Customer Commitment Framework to help businesses define their customers based on one of three “journeys” that they appear to be on (Shopping, Sharing or Advocacy) and then make decisions that allow them to craft a broad strategy around those three journey types to improve engagement, convert shoppers into customers and, ultimately, make them advocates.

In order to do this, the SDL Customer Commitment Framework aims to give businesses a contextual view of their customers’ experiences by leveraging and analyzing insights from social data (including monitoring conversations on social networks like Facebook and Twitter, ratings and review sites, user-generated content and much more) to provide a real-time view of each customer’s experience. This process will allow them to really dial-in on specific customer behaviors and trends, thus shortening the purchase cycle and ensuring businesses can provide constant relevance for their products/services as both markets and customer needs change.

The goal here is to provide brands with a quantitative measurement of just how engaged their customers are, and help them discern actionable ways that that data can be used to create better, more engaging (and successful) customer experience strategies. It even gives them insights into the social data of their competitors.

SDL’s Customer Commitment Framework is all built around a set of KPIs that form the scores that model and predict customer behavior. From there, the Framework aligns the KPIs against specific, measurable steps in the customer journeys. These journeys include Shopping, which is about moving a customer through a purchase cycle, Sharing, where brands try to enable their “primary audiences” to share content in the right places at the right times, and Advocacy, in which brands try to encourage their customers to actively promote their businesses.

From there, the Framework will segment customers into different groups based on the context of their interactions with the brands to provide optimal focus, and then it will use the information it gleans to give brands a “comprehensive and deeper level of understanding” of the behaviors and emotional triggers of their different contextual customer segments.

In other words, it becomes a process of reviewing a brand’s current social data against its competitors to uncover best practices, then helps them use those insights to build a playbook, of sorts, with an actionable campaign strategy, helps them align and execute their plans and then monitors and measures the results, to ensure that their actions are resulting in the desired outcomes.